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Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 3:34 am
by Lowry_Sam
I was perusing some new acquisitions and came across a very interesting tagline & searched the forum but was surprised to see there wasn't any thread dedicated to taglines/ad copy. It also occurred to me that they could make a great guessing game, so here it goes:
RECKLESS with WOMEN...He pursued them ..."petted" them...promised them nothing and got away with everything!
Hint 1
It's a Warner Archive blu-ray.
Hint 2
from 1934
Answer
Manhattan Melodrama
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 3:52 am
by domino harvey
The greatest tagline of all time remains “It’s exactly what you think it is” for
Pieces
Runner up: the incredible efficiency of “Different.”
the Children’s Hour
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 3:58 am
by nowhereisaplace
I was always a big fan of “There is no known cure for murder” from
Visiting Hours
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 5:20 am
by Lowry_Sam
Multiple progressively more revealing ones for a single film:
#1
This time... they've really gone
#2
This is not a sequel. There has never been anything like it!
#3
Beyond bizarre. Beyond outrageous. Beyond any film you've ever seen.
Answer:
Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 1:36 pm
by diamonds
Coincidentally, Nancy Friedman wrote
a short article just the other day about poor modern taglines.
I get a kick out of this translation used on Letterboxd of a supposed tagline:
A film disliked by women.
For:
Jean Eustache's
A Dirty Story, from the alleged original:
Un film que les femmes n'aiment pas.
Was it ever actually used on a poster?
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 2:51 pm
by beamish14
“You have to be there to see it.”
-The Ice Pirates
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 8:36 pm
by bad future
The "unwittingly" has always been my favorite part of this amazing poster
Day of the Dolphin
Also, IMDB, Letterboxd etc list the tagline for
Faraway, So Close!, Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire sequel,
as "Your favorite Angels are back!" which I've always found amusingly generic and on-the-nose, but AFAIK I've never seen anything official with that on it and don't know what it's based on.
Edit: apologies, I initially neglected the guessing game precedent!
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2026 10:27 pm
by knives
Lowry_Sam wrote: Mon Apr 06, 2026 5:20 am
Multiple progressively more revealing ones for a single film:
#1
This time... they've really gone
#2
This is not a sequel. There has never been anything like it!
#3
Beyond bizarre. Beyond outrageous. Beyond any film you've ever seen.
Answer:
Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls
Technically it is a sequel to Valley of the Dolls
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2026 6:53 pm
by mizo
Many of the examples listed above are strong, but my favorite has to be:
"Times like these call for a Big Lebowski."
Believe it or not, it's the tagline for
the Coen brothers' 1998 film The Big Lebowski
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2026 8:12 am
by MichaelB
I bet you can't guess which film had the tagline Titans Will Clash.
Someone actually got paid money to come up with that, and most probably more than I've ever been paid for jobs that took considerably more effort.
And one of my favourite taglines began "From the executive producer of...". I forget the film and indeed the executive producer, but it wasn't anyone I'd heard of before.
Oh, and there's Herschell Gordon Lewis' admirably honest approach to taglines, with "Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror!" and "It will leave you AGHAST!". But I strongly suspect from his commentaries—he's the only filmmaker I've ever heard referring to one of his own films as being "excreted" rather than released—that he was fully and gleefully aware of the double meaning from the start.
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2026 11:49 am
by reaky
I recall seeing a trailer in a Paris cinema for the Jackie Chan film Police Story, which had sarcastic taglines intoned in a gravelly voice interleaved between a welter of explosions and roundhouse kicks. “C’est un film sophistiqué… Un film intellectuel…”
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2026 4:34 pm
by Never Cursed
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2026 4:54 pm
by JSC
Can you guess these films from the taglines?
"An event...."
Earthquake
"Why are they putting seat belts in theaters this summer?"
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
"It's terrific!"
Citizen Kane
"The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92."
Suspiria (1977)
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2026 6:05 pm
by MichaelB
The last one has never made sense to me, because it's implying that it's mostly great but then becomes markedly less terrifying at just the point when you'd want things to ramp up.
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2026 6:56 pm
by JSC
I'm guessing someone had a brain freeze and meant to say:
The only thing scarier than the first 92 minutes are the last 12.
Either way it's a bit verbose for a tagline.
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2026 7:17 pm
by bad future
That sounds like the first draft before someone pointed out that 92 minutes of the scariest part is clearly a better value
Re: Keep telling yourself, it's only a tagline!
Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2026 1:43 am
by Lowry_Sam
Looks like there's at least one person working today who still has the skill:
"Touching Fans Everywhere
June 5"
And
#2
There Are No Safe Spaces
Answer:
Scary Movie (6/Michael)
